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MojoKid writes "Renowned Overclocker HiCookie used a Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H motherboard to achieve a fully validated 7.03GHz clock speed on an Intel Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge processor. As it stands, that's the highest clockspeed for an Ivy Bridge CPU, and it required a steady dose of liquid nitrogen to get there. HiCookie also broke a record for the highest memory speed on an Ivy Bridge platform, pushing his G.Skill Trident X DDR3-2800 memory kit populated in four DIMM slots to 3,280MHz. Not for the faint of heart, the record breaking CPU overclock required that HiCookie pump 1.956V to the processor, according to his CPU-Z screenshot. The CPU multiplier was set at x63."

True story!
As it is right now with the huge pipelines the indicated clock frequency doesn't matter all that much. Especially as the clock is often divided into sub cycles. The real issue still is - as it always has been - talking to the memory. And while ever smarter compilers combined with better out of order execution does help. It's still a hassle that you can't directly talk to the memory and need to wait. It really drags down the efficiency of your pipeline if you made a wrong prediction. The actual v

I don't think you really understand the purpose of this. He's not "running" anything, so it doesn't matter how many threads. An overclock like this is only done to say that it can be done and that you did it, it's not practical in any way shape or form. You would never try to run an actual application on this, odds are you couldn't maintain system stability for more than a few minutes, and even if you did the cooling and power requirements are well beyond reasonable.

No, these with these types of overclocks you can normally only run the system long enough to run CPU-Z and get a screenshot. The majority of windows services are not running, only one CPU core is running, and you are cooling it with liquid nitrogen that tends to boil away rather quickly.

Did anyone run the small penis jokes on the explorers that climbed mountains? That's something else that had little practical value, but I don't think climbers were heaped with ridicule for doing useless things. I'm not saying that overclocking is comparable, but it's less ridiculous as the risk of dying is lower.

It's the same performance as a 1.6Ghz quadcore with just air cooling, what you're seeing is how fast one core can go, given that all 4 running would quadruple the thermal requirements.

Generally the purpose of doing this is for shits and giggles, you would not be able to actually use the computer configured that way since the cooling solution would run out pretty quickly. The most you can do for a functional system is to immerse in mineral oil, with SSD drives and not submerge the PSU.This is generally a non

Except that it's not. For some theoretical computations that could be made perfectly parallel, this might be nearly true. However, in most cases (presently), the limiting factor in computation speed is the clock speed of an individual core.

Except that AMD's 2 cores aren't actually 2 cores. They're 1 instruction fetch unit, 1 instruction decode unit, 1 floating point unit, and 2 integer units, so this is a very similar result, it's one CPU core that is able to do a bit of stuff at the same time as it does some other stuff, not really 2 cores.

I honestly don't understand why. These ridiculous liquid nitrogen overclocks have absolutely no real world implications whatsoever. They completely trash the hardware, and for what? A big number? What the hell good is that?

It's a shame, because the people that should be getting the hype and recognition are the ones that are overclocking their systems while still having a modicum of stability with real-world applications and reasonable up-time, because at least that's useful to enthusiasts and pushes a r

I honestly don't understand why. These ridiculous liquid nitrogen overclocks have absolutely no real world implications whatsoever. They completely trash the hardware, and for what? A big number? What the hell good is that?

It's a shame, because the people that should be getting the hype and recognition are the ones that are overclocking their systems while still having a modicum of stability with real-world applications and reasonable up-time, because at least that's useful to enthusiasts and pushes a real envelope as opposed to a bullshit fake one that only a very, very select few can duplicate and even fewer would even bother.

Want to impress me? Crank out stable 5+ GHz on air cooling across all the cores in an always-on machine. Playing games with liquid Nitrogen is not impressive at all. These guys are the ricers of the computer world.

Actually, you are wrong. I'm not speaking for overclockers and in fact, I'm not even one. However, extreme overclocking is very valuable. It tells normal overclockers how much headroom they can expect (at least relative to another chip), it gives an indication of how robust the chip design and the process technology is.

Your car analogy is completely wrong as well. A ricer analogy would be someone who uses a fancy case but does nothing to improve the internals. The analogy would be someone who takes a stock engine and tries to rev it to the maximum possible rpm by using any means. I imagine that many people would find this a valuable metric especially when they are comparing various engines, especially for specialized needs such as drag racing.

No it doesn't, because it tells you nothing about the shape of the curve. For example, Sandy Bridge never hit huge liquid nitrogen over clocks, but it did overclock extremely well for enthusiasts (it can generally hit >4.5Ghz on air, 5Ghz on water). Meanwhile Bulldozer hit a record 8.4Ghz, but in practice, it doesn't overclock that well (4-4.5 is about the most you can get out of it even on water).

No it doesn't, because it's being demonstrated in completely unrealistic conditions with no real world component at all. Your car analogy failed as well the instant you said "stock", because this chip wasn't stock, nor was the means to o/c it. They disabled all but one core. Who is going to do that? Nobody but an idiot overclocker looking to get a big number. They used liquid nitrogen and completely trashed all of the hardware that went into this o/c. Who is going to do that? Nobody but an idiot over

Well, yes, that would be impressive. Because if it could run and stay stable at that speed with off the shelf components, surely it would just be sold at that speed for a nice $50 premium or whatever?
Not that I'm saying I think it's impressive or even worth their time. But I think it's probably the only kind of overclocking which is really possible (except for really small amounts, and then still a bit of loss in stability over time). I'm no insider in the industry but I can only assume these chips are te

Couldn't POWER CPUs do >5 GHz as their normal speed already a loong time ago? (Apart from being a much better architecture to begin with.)And didn't many people do 7GHz overclockings, using liquid nitrogen, over five years ago?How meaningless is a overclocking speed? It's like saying: Your Smart will go 400km/h... if only we run it as ten bazillion RPM. It's still a Smart!! And you will never get this in real life!This is damn close to fraud, to spread such bullshit so people get a false feeling of it be

The point is that the CPU and the motherboard are all manufactured in such a way that the processor can work at a clock cycle so damn fast. That is precision. Not everything is about work/time. To your analogy, it's more like saying "We can have the engine do ten bazillion RPM! That's a quality engine! However, if you try to drive at that RPM, any flaw in the system can cause a huge amount of damage, so don't expect to drive it at that speed."

How meaningless is a overclocking speed? It's like saying: Your Smart will go 400km/h... if only we run it as ten bazillion RPM. It's still a Smart!! And you will never get this in real life!This is damn close to fraud, to spread such bullshit so people get a false feeling of it being so fast.

The part of the country that is into NASCAR would not appreciate being called a Yankee... entirely different connotation down there - something about the invention of "total war" occurring on their land.

NASCAR started with liquor running during Prohibition, so speed was more important than handling. Given that, I can kind of excuse the initial use of an oval track. But once the speeds got too high, they started restricting the cars and so the oval track was sort of an anachronism... very hard for me to get

I lost interest in Nascar when they no longer represented real cars. I'd like to see them go to the showroom, pick out a car and race the thing. Some safety upgrades maybe but it must be "stock" at least the fucking shell should be anyway.

I agree, that would also be pretty damn cool. I watched the show Bullrun [wikipedia.org] when it was on the Speed Channel a few years ago, but it was annoying with all the added drama nonsense that reality TV does these days, and the challenges were pretty retarded, too.

Just a bunch of teams, drive whatever you want, Point A to Point B. Good stuff.

Yeah because Hz == Hz? Hmm.. welcome to the MHz Myth. You probably haven't heard of it, but you should.
It's like this: Hz a measure of steps per time, like counting number of steps mer minute taken by someone who runs. Imagine a short person and a tall person that take an equal number of steps. Who runs the farthest? The tall man or the short man? Pentium 4 or a Ivy Bridge Core i7?
It's not your 10 year old Pentium4.. In case you cot lost in the lesson somewhere.

Yes.I was being tongue-in-cheek.I know my P4 isn't as fast..... I know that every time I try to play an HD-quality movie, and it runs at quarter speed. The CPU is fast in cycles but slow in calculations.

Oh wait, no it can't. It also isn't quad core, and does about 20% of the work per clock.

There are limits to GHz scaling. It isn't a situation of "Oh just make it faster," particularly if you want to hit a power budget. What has happened is that CPUs have gotten much more parallel, much more efficient per clock, and have gotten much better at vector math. My Sandy Bridge processor pulls like 80 Gflops on Linpack using AVX. Try that on a P4, let me know how it goes.

I own the mentioned UD5H motherboard used for the record memory speed; I bought it to replace a very old P5B Deluxe. I am in no way jealous or unappreciative of HiCookie's feat, and the board definitely looks like something that can handle such a thing, but my experience with the board has been middling.

I haven't had the freezes that people have mentioned on its Newegg page [newegg.com] (thank the gods!) and things generally work, but Windows 7 64-bit simply refuses to hybrid sleep or hibernate, and after a non-hybrid standby to RAM, things subtly fuck up (no audio, and other devices I forget at the moment mess up), which means I have to fully reboot (really fun when waiting for big programs like Catalyst) or leave the rig on at FULL POWAH through the night or whatever. Arch Linux was working well at first (RAM standby and even disk hibernate if properly configured and I choose to boot from the Linux drive after the suspend), but updates seem to have made it less compatible with my audio (audio out works except through the standard green line-out...odd) and TV tuner (not detected), for whatever reason. (I left a few more details on a review on the Newegg page, minus the less-compatible part.) The P5B had no such problems: its audio had lots of RF interference through headphones (the UD5H has beautifully clear onboard audio when it works) but it suspended, automatically resumed from the suspended drive, and otherwise worked nicely.

For me, a "middling" board is worse than a "horrible" one, because at least a horrible would be bad enough for me to undo all the cable connections and screw placements and attachments and all that to trade for something better (a very old backup PC I had started getting POST errors as I built the new one so combined with other factors it made referring to the internet kinda impossible...that was fun). With a middling one I simply tolerate the few problems because it mostly works. *shrugs*

You people are embarrassing. A guy manages to overclock a processor to 7GHz and all you can do is bitch about how you can't do anything with it. Do you make fun of people who climb mountains or build with legos because there's no practical purpose to them?

Nobody is saying this is useful. It's just some guy saying, "Hey look, I got my processor all the way up to 7GHz!", stop taking things so seriously.

I can remember the days when every Mhz made a difference and you had to turn off Turbo for some programmes.

Back then, reaching 100Mhz was a huge milestone; But then the GigaHertz wars began.

It was actually interesting to see how well someone overclocked their Celeron 300A or their Athlons. As the Mhz crept up to 500Mhz, 600Mhz, 700Mhz, we were all getting excited, waiting for the day that one of the x86 giants would hit the Holy Grail of 1,0

Ah. So Intel is somewhat abusing the traditional meaning of a bus multiplier, and we don't actually know anything about the memory bus speed. *sigh*

However, we do know that they're running that base clock more than 10% faster than normal, which probably means that either their RAM is faster than the spec requires or they are running at a slower bus speed than the maximum. No idea which.